Late Print Culture’s Social Media Revolution: Authorship, Collaboration and Copy Machines

Abstract

This article examines the impact of copy machines on late twentieth-century print cultures. Specifically, this article makes a case for “dry copying,” the method of print reproduction perfected by Xerox in the late 1950s, as a unique medium rather than a weak imitation of other printing methods. Following the claim that the widespread availability of copy machines in the late twentieth century represented the arrival of a new medium, this article further examines how understandings of authorship, established with print culture, came undone in the era of the copy machine. Finally, this paper makes a case for understanding copy machines as a form of “social media” that opened up opportunities for writers, readers and publishers to create, share, exchange and comment on texts and images in communities and networks of their own making in the decades preceding the development of the web.